A while ago I mentioned some distraction-free, full-screen word processors, namely Write-Or-Die and Darkroom. Well, though both applications had elements I liked (and Write-Or-Die was downright amusing with its incorporation of ‘punishment’), neither really did the trick. Well, I may have found something that does.
FocusWriter, available free from Gott Code, may just be the first draft writing software I’ve been looking for. It’s small, simple, and doesn’t burden the user with a lot of extraneous options and menus. It’s full screen when you want it to be, and by simply moving your cursor to the top or bottom you can summon the tucked away menus. And the display options for text color and two levels of background are completely customizable — you can stick with bog-standard black on white, or do light text on a dark background, even put an image or photograph in as your background. As a fan of white text on blue I was really pissed-off to see the latest MS word no longer offered the option — unless you wanted to screw with display options that had to be tweaked back to standard before ever sending your file out.
FocusWriter also keeps a running tally of your word count and time spent writing. What’s more, you can set either of these things as your daily writing goal, which FocusWriter displays as a percentage. It’s a pretty nice feeling to be typing away and see that you’ve achieved ’128%’ of your goal for the day.
So, full-screen, great customization, simple functionality — even has a good running spell-checker. FocusWriter does however save its files as text documents, so I find it necessary to paste a rough draft into another program to format the line-spacing and headers before saving again as an .rtf. But, that minor piece of busy work aside, I have to say I’m loving the process of writing in FocusWriter more than any other software I’ve used, and I’m even contemplating creating different theme backgrounds to compliment what I’m working on.
Especially when compared to the clueless behemoth that is the latest incarnation of MS Word with its acres of esoteric menu functions, FocusWriter is the lean, mean writing software that you’ve always wanted. And it’s available for Mac users, as well as PC.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the report. I might try this for the next story I start from scratch.
I can always count on you for reviews on the latest low-tech writer assistance. I’m going to give this a shot.
I’ll have to give it a try, though at work I’m saddled with Word.
I like this idea. Anything to keep me from screaming at word!! I assume that with this you can copy and paste into word as an option for submission ???
Yes, it saves everything as a standard text file, and you can just copy it to whatever program you want.
Let me know what you guys think once you’ve tried it!
I have to say I’m pretty addicted to WriteRoom (the Mac program that inspired DarkRoom, and which is a thousands times better than DarkRoom) and I use it for every first draft I write now.
I like the program in theory, but would much prefer if I could play with paragraphing and save as RTF. Still, anything that helps writers actually write is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.
I agree, that’s sort of the one thing that’s missing. Still, I’ve gotten used to it, and the transfer from text to .rtf sort of helps mark the break between the draft and polishing stage.